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Samsung Electronics Co. Galaxy S24 smartphones during a media preview event in Seoul, South Korea, on Monday, Jan. 15, 2024. Samsung, the world’s most prolific smartphone maker, is leaning into artificial intelligence as the key to unlocking greater sales this year. Photographer: SeongJoon Cho/Bloomberg via Getty Images

SeongJoon Cho | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Artificial intelligence phones: these are the buzzwords you’ll likely hear this year, as smartphone players look to jump on the AI hype to boost sales of their devices after a difficult stretch of time.

OpenAI’s ChatGPT, released in late 2022, sparked huge interest in generative AI, specifically — models trained on huge amounts of data that are able to produce text, images and prompts from user videos. Since then, AI excitement has touched every industry and entered the popular imagination.

Smartphone makers see a chance to cash in and are going to be touting the tech at the Mobile World Congress (MWC), the biggest mobile industry trade show in the world, which kicks off on Monday in Barcelona, Spain.

“Nobody wants to be seen as being behind the curve, and AI is just the talk of the town. It is the buzzword this year that all the vendors are going to be jumping on,” Bryan Ma, vice president of client devices research at IDC, told CNBC.

What is an AI phone?

The gear is harder to define, and it depends on which manufacturer you ask.

Analysts who spoke to CNBC broadly agree on a few things — that these devices will have more advanced chips to run AI applications, and that those AI apps will run on-device rather than in the cloud.

Companies like Qualcomm and MediaTek have launched smartphone chipsets that enable the processing power required for AI applications.

But AI tech inside phones is not new. Some aspects of AI have been in devices for years and have allowed features such as background blur effects on smartphones and picture editing.

What is new is the introduction of large language models and generative AI. Large language models are huge AI models trained on vast amounts of data that underpin applications like the widely popular chatbots. These models unlock new features, such as the ability for chatbots to generate images or text from a user prompt.

“It is not just about having a chatbot, we have had these virtual assistants for a while. The difference is, it is generative now, so they can create a poem or summarize meetings. If it is about text to image creation, that was something that wasn’t done before,” Ma said.

The other big part of the AI smartphone puzzle is the term “on-device AI.” Previously, many AI applications on devices were actually partly processed in the cloud, then downloaded onto the phone. But advanced chips and the ability for large language models to effectively become smaller are likely to drive more AI applications to be run solely in the device, rather than in a data center.

“I think one of the big stories at MWC will be the ability of the AI models too run natively on the devices themselves and that is where it potentially starts to become a bit more of a gamechanger,” Ben Wood, chief analyst at CCS Insight, told CNBC.

Smartphone makers say on-device AI improves the security of gear, unlocks new applications and also makes them faster, since the processing is done on the handset.

This could unlock new applications that developers could create, both Ma and Wood said.

Eventually, Wood said, smartphone makers want to achieve “anticipatory computing” — the idea that AI “is smart enough to learn your behavior as a user and make the device so much more intuitive and predicting what you want to do next without you having to do much.”

But are AI phones a reality right now?

Taiwan Semi, Samsung and ASML are underappreciated AI plays, says T. Rowe Price's Rizzo

MWC will likely include demonstrations of AI features, from camera apps to chatbots on phones.

But the reality is that a lot of these perks are not actually on-device and still rely on processing in the cloud, according to IDC’s Ma. He added that, even with AI capabilities on devices, it will take a “number of years” before third-party developers figure out a “killer use case or that compelling use case that consumer can’t do without.”

Wood said the danger is that smartphone manufacturers talk a lot about AI, rather than about the experiences that the technology can deliver for users.

“Consumers have no idea what an AI smartphone is, they need the use cases to go round it,” Wood said. The risk is that there is “AI fatigue.”

Ultimately, the lofty AI experiences smartphone makers are dreaming of could be a long way out.

“We are building an unbelievable foundational platform for AI on device. 2024 will be the year we look back on and say that’s where it all started to happen but it could be a long time before we start of these benefit of that in terms of game changing experiences,” Wood said.

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Here’s how fusion energy could power your home or an AI data center

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Here's how fusion energy could power your home or an AI data center

Clean Start: Fusion energy gets new look from startup Type One Energy

The artificial intelligence boom has sent energy demand soaring. Some of the supercomputers sucking up all that power are helping to find new energy sources.

Fusion energy is the process of forcing two hydrogen atoms to combine and form one helium atom, which releases huge amounts of power. It uses a stellarator, a type of fusion reactor invented in the 1950’s that produces heat.

Until now, the technology was too difficult to deploy commercially.

But this old concept has brand new potential. Type One Energy, a startup based in Tennessee, claims to have proven that fusion energy will be able to produce electricity in the next decade.

“It’s going to create heat that’s going to boil water, make steam, run a turbine and put fusion electrons on the power grid on a 24/7 reliable basis,” said Type One Christofer Mowry.

AI has made it all practical.

“Things have really accelerated remarkably over the last five or six years,” Mowry said. “The supercomputers have allowed industry, academia and large institutions to develop now and actually test at large scale the science machines that demonstrate the process.”

Dozens of other companies are working on different approaches to fusion energy, but Mowry said Type One is so far the only one with the proven stellarator technology to implement at existing power plants. It will soon be tested with the Tennessee Valley Authority.

TDK Ventures is betting that Mowry is right.

“With Type One Energy solutions, we expect outsized return potential,” said Nicola Sauvage, president of TDK Ventures. “Fusion is no longer science fiction, and Type One Energy’s technology is catching up fast to the vision of this low-cost, continuous green energy.”

Type One is also backed by Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Centaurus Capital, GD1, Foxglove Capital, and SeaX Ventures, and has raised a total of $82.4 million.

Fusion energy is different from nuclear power, and there’s no risk of a nuclear accident. The power source has no long-term radioactive waste, and, according to Mowry, can’t be weaponized.

But for handling AI, it could be a critical solution. Fusion energy can be deployed anywhere, whether it’s next to a data center or near a large industrial park that needs clean, reliable energy.

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CoreWeave shares soar 19% after $2 billion debt offering

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CoreWeave shares soar 19% after  billion debt offering

Michael Intrator, Founder & CEO of CoreWeave, Inc., Nvidia-backed cloud services provider, gestures during the company’s IPO at the Nasdaq Market, in New York City, U.S., March 28, 2025. 

Brendan Mcdermid | Reuters

CoreWeave shares popped 19% after announcing a $2 billion debt offering.

The renter of artificial intelligence data centers powered by Nvidia chips said it had priced the notes at 9.25%, with a June 2030 maturity date. The deal represents a $500 million increase from its initial announcement.

CoreWeave said it plans to use the capital to pay off outstanding debt. The company confirmed to CNBC that the debt offering was five times oversubscribed.

In its first-quarter earnings report last week, CoreWeave said that it raised a total of $17.2 billion in equity and debt “to support its strategy to drive the next generation of cloud computing for the future of AI.” The company topped revenues expectations but posted wider-than-expected net loss and said it plans to spend big on capital expenditures to support infrastructure demand.

Read more CNBC tech news

During an interview with CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” last week, CEO Michael Intrator defended CoreWeave’s spending plans after some investors cast doubt on its debt, and demand durability. He said the company is meeting “demand signals” from some of its major clients.

In a call with analysts, CoreWeave said it has no debt maturities until 2028 other than payments related to vendor financing and “self-amortizing debt through committed contract payments.” The company said it had about $3.8 billion in current debt and $4.9 billion in non-current debt at the end of the quarter.

A year ago, CoreWeave announced that it had raised $7.5 billion in debt, led by Blackstone and Magnetar, to more heavily invest in its cloud data centers. CoreWeave said in its IPO prospectus that it was “one of the largest private debt financings in history and signals the confidence that debt investors have in funding our company to build and scale the next generation AI cloud.”

CoreWeave counts Nvidia and Microsoft among its biggest customers and has signed two seperate deals with OpenAI, totaling nearly $16 billion.

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Amazon CEO Andy Jassy says tariffs haven’t dented consumer spending

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Amazon CEO Andy Jassy says tariffs haven't dented consumer spending

Andy Jassy, CEO of Amazon, speaks during an unveiling event in New York on Feb. 26, 2025.

Michael Nagle | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said Wednesday that the company hasn’t seen any signs of consumers tightening their wallets in the face of President Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs.

Jassy’s comments came during Amazon’s annual shareholder meeting, which was held virtually on Wednesday.

“We have not seen any attenuation of demand at this point,” Jassy said during a question-and-answer portion of the meeting. “We also haven’t yet seen any meaningful average selling price increases.”

Amazon and other retailers continue to digest the impact of Trump’s tariffs. Rival retailer Walmart warned last week that consumers could start seeing price hikes from tariffs later this month and in June. Within days, that sparked the ire of Trump, who urged the company to “EAT THE TARIFFS.”

Read more CNBC Amazon coverage

Target said Wednesday it will likely need to hike prices on some items, while Home Depot said it expects to maintain its current pricing levels.

Jassy said last month the company made some “strategic forward inventory buys” to stock up on goods and is “pretty maniacally focused” on keeping prices low for shoppers.

Some third-party sellers, which account for roughly 60% of products sold, have increased prices on certain items, while others have opted to keep prices steady, Jassy said on Wednesday.

“I think that the diversity and the size of our marketplace really helps customers have the best selection of the best prices,” Jassy said.

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